Field
Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to monitoring a circular region at a mobile device including using entrance of the mobile device into that region as criteria to enable location tracking for the mobile device while it is within the region. Exiting the region may be used to cause the mobile device to disable location tracking for the mobile device and only perform region monitoring. While performing location tracking within the circular region, the location of the mobile device can be used to monitor the location of the device with respect to a contained or partially contained irregularly shaped geofence. Enter and Exit events can be generated for this irregularly shaped geofence using the location updates from the mobile device.
Description of the Related Art
The cellular phone market is transitioning from ‘feature’ phones to ‘smart’ mobile devices. Feature phones primarily allow phone calls and text messages. Smart mobile devices (phones, tables, etc.) allow the functionality of a laptop computer in a smaller mobile device. Smart mobile devices can connect to the Internet either over the cell phone network or by using Wi-Fi connectivity. Smart mobile devices can run small software applications known as apps. Smart mobile devices can be aware of the device location through the use of a Global Positioning System (GPS) chip, cell phone tower triangulation, or a Wi-Fi network location mapping.
Certain applications track the location of the smart mobile device through the use of some or all of the methodologies available to the device. Navigation software applications are an example of one class of applications that track the location of the mobile device with high precision in order to be able to provide detailed turn-by-turn navigation instructions. However, navigation applications also consume a corresponding large amount of the available battery power.
Smart mobile devices can receive emails, containing rich media information, but the email is not specific to the location where the mobile device is located.
As part of the Location Services provided by the mobile operating system on the smart mobile device, the devices are able to identify and track the position of the device relative to predefined circular regions. This process is known as Region Monitoring. An example region may be a geographic area defined by a circular area of a specified radius defined around a geographic point (e.g., latitude, longitude), such as a point of interest to the user. The Location Service on the mobile device may be programmed with Regions to monitor. After establishing regions to monitor, the mobile operating system (OS) will notify a corresponding location based mobile application on the mobile device when the mobile device has entered or exited a region that the application has designated for the mobile OS to monitor.
It may be helpful at times to track the location of a mobile device more accurately than is possible with region monitoring. However, this type of location tracking requires a larger amount of battery power. A strategy to preserve mobile device battery would be to enable location tracking within a pre-defined area or region, and disable location tracking when the mobile device is not within the region.